Mosaics: a long poem

I wrote most of this poem some years back. It was then that I started to write long poems in the narrative style, but poems being a different genre from that of a story or narrative refuse to be shackled by time sequence, a plot, or progression and unraveling. They have another logic or, let us say, form of communication which dispenses with all that makes a story a story. Poems are moments of illumination that shoot through our awareness like meteors and speak to us with the tongue of vision.

I grew up in a world always on the edge, always threatened to be dragged into the abyss. The Palestinian tragedy haunted me like it haunted every one in the Arab world. It was as if I always knew that one day I had to face the terrible tragedy of war , the horror of the death of so many and resolve it. When I was twenty two years old I wrote a play predicting my future, as the dreamy girl-heroine of the play faces the issue of war and destruction, pitting the dream of beauty and peace against harrowing suffering. She could not resolve the issue of violence and paid for it with her life. When I was thirty one, while I was writing my theses in Swansea Wales, I returned to the subject in a long poem I named: Am I Living or Dying? Only by then, I had acquired a historical perspective. The world I originally came from is an old world which gave birth to and witnessed the first civilizations of mankind. That world of my origin died several times and was reborn several times. Past and present in that world are sometimes interchangeable, so that if you are a person of vision you become aware of the endless recurrence of a pattern rising and falling like the waves of the sea: one civilization rising and another falling; with life renewing itself and death surrendering to life. You acquire a prophetic soul and write like a Cassandra or a Sybil.

When I rewrote parts of my poem again in the wake of the Syrian Revolution, I understood why I did no try to publish the poem until now because now is the right time for it. The way I see it, is that while we are dying, we are also living in memory, in time past and present and preparing to live in time future The death of the Syrians in multitudes remains the central spiritual question that I have to unravel or at least live with. We have to live their deaths and die their lives even as they die, but we have also to carry them and ourselves into the future.This can only done by giving life the last word, but life without love to seal it and hold it together is empty and hollow.

I have given my poem the subtitle: Mosaics, because it is composed of little windows opening on different disparate experiences juxtaposed and assembled together in order to carry the poem to its final destination: rebirth and life renewed. The poem lingers at every illuminated window to assign to it its special space in the illuminated whole.

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Alisar Iram

I am an artist, a writer and a researcher. I know Arabic and English . I am interested in music and art of every description. I like to describe myself as the embodiment of a harmonious marriage between two cultures which I value and treasure.